Baltimore Can Stack ‘Em Up - Prequel
A special thank you goes to Lou Spirito, Graphics Director at the Baltimore Sun for providing the graphs below and some valuable insight.
Recently, I wrote a blog post about the homicide rate in Baltimore and included the second graph below, which can be found here.
Lou was gracious enough to share with me that the original graph that was designed for the article was the second one below, which is a bar chart overlaid with two series. Then, the chart was redesigned to be the line chart shown below. Prior to the release, it was then reverted back to the originally designed bar chart. I have said before that I prefer line charts to stacked bar charts, but this may be an exception. Here is a quote from Lou that explains part of the design choice.
“I agree with your observation that in this particular case the bars are superior to the line chart for the simple reason that the relationship of the “annual” and “first quarter” data remains unified — this relationship gets lost to some degree in the line chart.” [Lou Spirito]
Because the two series have a significant scale variance, it is helpful to use the bar chart where you can add the values to the smaller series that has less variance between the years than the second series. Adding values to the line chart would make it unreadable.
Granted, both would work well and serve the purpose, but I really like the bar chart with the two overlaid series. Also, the use of color is clean, neat and effective without being gaudy. I may have changed the labels on the x-axis to be every five or ten years, but otherwise it is well designed.
Content is king and sometimes that means going unconventional. See Lou’s comment below.
“We take great care to design graphics with content driving the way. Sometimes it means breaking standard convention at the risk of fielding criticism…” [Lou Spirito]
Intermediate design before reverting back to the original:
Original and Final Design:
Which one do you think is more effective and why?
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